Harmon
by InquisitorVawn
Summary: A Tech-Priest reflects on his all-too-human condition.


Harmon Fleit was lonely. It was a feeling that was long unfamiliar to him, as was the sensation of having feelings at all. As a Tech Priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus he'd known the sacred serenity of the machine, the suppression and then eventual deletion of wants, emotions, desires. The utter clarity of thought, only concerned with the logical outcome and unsullied by the… untidiness… of the human being. More so than the replacement of the flesh, mastery of the mind was the ultimate strength of the Mechanicus, becoming the machine in order to serve the machine was the pinnacle he'd sought.

But the foul Xenos torturers had managed to do what he'd thought to be impossible. They'd cut through the veil of logic, peeled back the machine and burrowed deep into the core of him, into the primal part of his consciousness that even amongst the Martian Priesthood only the highest of the Magi had ever managed to fully excise. They'd found that tiny spark, the human drive for the preservation of self and like an ember they'd banked it, tended it as they taught him to feel again. To feel fear, of his life being extinguished in that unholy place, of his consciousness being torn asunder by heretical AIs and fed into the filthy data streams of Xeno thinking machines. To feel hope that one day he'd be free from their ministrations, free to return to the embracing fold of the Machine Cult, hope that they'd delighted in crushing before his eyes in order to feed on the anguish and sense of betrayal it caused in him. And anger. Anger that they'd succeeded in undoing what he'd striven so hard to achieve, that they'd befouled his pure logic and returned him to the basest of human drives.

Every day since his rescue, he'd struggled to find that serenity once more. He'd attended the services in the Enginarium, sitting, standing and working amongst the red-robed flock of his fellow Mechanicus. But the rituals no longer brought the same sense of ordered peace as they once did. His refusal to repair and reinstall his vox transmitter or his hand was seen as irrational, illogical. So they indulged him, reading his dataslates or allowing direct port data transfers where possible but the sense of distance, the reluctance to deal with the malfunctioning machine grew each time they did. And he'd gradually stopped attending the services. He still enacted the rites of activation and the rituals of the machines in his own workshop, but even they had become little more than perfunctory rote actions performed through only habit rather than any real sense of connection or desire to commune with the Omnissiah.

Of course, the simple answer would be to repair his damaged components, recite the litanies and don the robes once more, returning to his place as a cog in the great machine. As if it were so easy that wrapping himself in the lie would make it suddenly become true if he wished it hard enough. If he chanted the right code, anointed the right oils and made the right gestures the other tech-adepts and Engineseers would accept him back into the fold and his eccentricities would be left in the past as a harmless glitch – but the Machine God would know. And more importantly _he_ would know it was all a falsehood.

He hissed a sigh between his teeth and stood up from the workbench he'd been perched in front of, leaving the herd of tiny, mindless constructs he'd been building to bumble sightlessly across its surface in his absence. Looking around the workshop he'd been granted, he lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. It could have been worse. After the whirlwind fight on the Dark Eldar citadel he'd been swept up in the rush of escaping slaves, buoyed along in the tide of bodies as they were shepherded into the belly of the ship where they now resided. In the crush of the cargo hold he'd tried to keep out of the way, to avoid attracting attention but the truth of what he was – what he had been – kept him apart and the subject of speculation. Some feared that they'd let another mad Tech Priest among their lot, accusing eyes behind his back watching for hints that he was the protégé of the Bloodsmith.

Then the tall man had come, walking amongst the rescued slaves and picking those who met his secretive criteria before drawing them away to other parts of the ship. After he'd taken Harmon away and appraised him, he'd introduced himself as Steinar Martell, Seneschal to the Lord-Captain Darrius Duperré and master of secrets aboard ship. At first Harmon had been worried, afraid once more that his dysfunction would be exposed and render him fit for nothing more than reclamation into a servitor – or worse. He soon realised however that those fears had been unfounded as he'd been ushered in to what he soon realised was to be his new workshop. He'd been told that he was working for Mister Martell now, that he'd be given free rein to do what he would with his own time, but should the Seneschal call, his services as a trained member of the Mechanicus would be required immediately and without question. A compulsive urge had nearly caused him to respond on his dataslate with a quip about being ill-equipped to question anything in the first place, but he'd quelled that thought for the time being. He still wasn't entirely sure what those services would entail, or how he'd go about fulfilling the orders he was yet to be given. But now was not the time for questioning.

And so he'd settled into the small yet functional space in the upper decks of the ship. He knew from walking the corridors on his now-infrequent trips to the enginarium that he was somewhere in the upper decks, surrounded by luxury and ornamentation as he was. Communing with the ships cogitators further revealed that he was not too distant from Mister Martell's quarters, which in turn were next in line to the Lord Captain's own suites. The workshop was more than suitable; certainly more spacious than anything he'd be offered down in the enginarium and infinitely quieter than an open hold full of thousands of moving, talking, breathing human bodies. Mister Martell had ordered the modest suite outfitted with everything Harmon had asked for, removing the carpets and wood panelling and stripping the rooms back to a blank template before refitting them with gleaming steel work surfaces, solid tool racks and lockers. A small alcove at the rear held a basic cot and some connectors for recharging his potential coil if required.

Then he was left, alone in his new sanctum. He wasn't a prisoner of any sort, the doors were unlocked and indeed as an agent of Mister Martell he appeared to have access to nearly the entire span of the ship; save of course for the Lord-Captain's own quarters and the Navigator's tower. Yet he remained within the workshop, the heavy steel doors closed and keypad coded. He tried to lose himself in work; tinkering with circuits and schematics, developing his machines and destroying them in an endless cycle of time wasted. His internal chronometer still kept excellent time, notifying him to the second exactly how much time he'd spent in this self-imposed exile, staring at the blank metal walls and hoping for the answer to a question he didn't know how to ask to spring fully-formed into his head - or hoping futilely to just stop feeling anything at all.

This feeling of restlessness was new and entirely unwelcome. Before he'd been capable of sitting and working on something for hours, days at a time depending on his energy levels and the requirements of the machine spirits; it didn't matter if it was as repetitive as welding a single joint on the corner of each piece of machine strut as they flowed past on a conveyor belt or as complex as recalibrating and reprogramming a series of constructor cogitators. Each task was a worthy one in the eyes of the Omnissiah, it didn't matter if it a special order handed down by the Magi or that day's routine tasks that had to be completed every day at that time – there was no room to question, no imagination to wander and get bored. Communication was in binary or techna-lingua, bursts of noise and data that compacted maximum meaning into minimal time and energy expenditure. Now he could barely stand to spend a day at a time at his benches; his routine maintenance tasks were of course completed to the highest possible standard, but he found himself lacking for ideas of what to do after that point. Hours in prayer, drawing transient designs in pools of sacred machine oil and lighting cone after cone of incense no longer seemed to hold any sense of divine purpose for him.

His measured pacing around the benches had started to speed up as the frustration and restlessness was replaced once more by a simmering anger. Not for the first time he felt his missing hand clench in rage, the tension travelling up through his wrist and into his shoulder. He tried to shake the phantom sensation out, to command his muscles and tendons to release the digits that they were no longer anchored to. The stubborn refusal of the limb to behave only fuelled his distress and he wheeled abruptly about, drawing back his arm before punching forward into the face of a pressed-steel locker with the stump of his wrist. The stab of pain up through his limb seemed to shock his brain into clarity and he stepped back, dropping against the bench in the middle of the room and sliding down to sit on the floor before it. Shame welled and he dropped his head, the hood of his robes falling forward once more to conceal him completely, though there was no one to observe.

Completely still now, he folded his good hand over his stump and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of the ship around him and trying desperately to reflect his physical stillness in his soul. He felt the distant thrumming of the ship's engines as they powered it through the void, an imperceptible vibration by dampened distance and the superstructure of the ship. The air exchangers whispered atmosphere into and out of the room from vents at floor level behind the tool racks, a near sub-sonic thumping suggesting a fan somewhere was in dire need of servicing. Perhaps he'd find a way into the maintenance shafts at some point and seek it out for repair. The scratching and scraping of his constructs on the bench above him was punctuated at random points by faintly ringing ticks as one or another of the tiny machines blundered over the edge and fell to the floor below.


End file.
